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Recap: October 2017

November 1st, 2017

October is one of my favorite months – part of it is because the weather gets cooler and the other part are events like our anniversary and Halloween. This past month can pretty much be divided into 5 major things!

Work User Conference

My company had our annual user conference early in October. Instead of hiring lots of event staff, they encourage employees to volunteer, and it’s a great way to meet the people who use our products. The past several years, I’ve helped out with photography, and I did it again this year along with two hired photographers.

Though not all of the photos have been posted yet, I’ve already recognized some of my photos being used in articles and social media. Some of my past photos were also used in slide decks for the conference. It always feels good to see my photos out there!

Anniversary

October 9th was our 6th wedding anniversary! Unfortunately, it fell right on my work’s user conference, so we couldn’t really celebrate that day. We went to a couple of our favorite restaurants before and after the conference days, so that sort of counted. I might still make a reservation to a nice restaurant to “officially” celebrate though. Better late than never, right? (Fun fact: October 29th is our dating anniversary, and it’s been 12 years since we’ve been together!)

Decluttering / Organization

I made a lot of progress on decluttering our house. I finally made trips to a couple places to donate our clothing and other items, and we bought new furniture too. Our bedroom got a large overhaul, but I’ll save that for later when I finish. I also bought a glass shelf to store all of my figures. I originally had them out in different places, but I was tired of dusting them. Though this isn’t air tight, it’s still going to be a lot better than before.

Halloween

My work has a big Halloween event every year! Part of it involves decorating our areas. We’re given a budget and can decorate our area for people to walk through during our Halloween party. My area did a Nightmare Before Christmas theme, and I’m so proud of everyone’s hard work! Almost all of our decorations were hand-made, and it was amazing to see everyone working together and everyone’s creative side. Here’s a video of the area!

As for my Halloween costume, I decided to revisit my Portal costume from a few years ago. Back then, I wore it as the Portal 1 version, but I wanted to make the boots for the Portal 2 version. I procrastinated though and only gave myself a few days to get it done. But! I finished! (See this entry on my cosplay blog if you want to see how I made them.)

Inktober

Lastly, my only goal for October was to participate in and finish Inktober, which is where you do an ink drawing every day of the month. This was a success! Not only did I complete 31 ink drawings, but I also managed to do them all on time.

To motivate myself, I went with a Halloween theme of characters dressing up as other characters, and I made a list of what I wanted to draw ahead of time:

Day 1-8: Voltron characters as Ghibli characters

Day 9-18: One Piece characters as other Shonen Jump characters

Day 19-31: My Hero Academia characters as video game characters

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you’ve already seen me posting my drawing each day. If you haven’t, my #inktober2017 tag on Tumblr is probably the easiest way to see them all. Here are some of my favorites!

I really enjoyed doing this, and it’s especially satisfying to see the improvements I made from the beginning to the end. It was such good practice, so I hope to continue this each year!

Now that October is a wrap, it’s time to make goals for November:

1. Finish cleaning up and decorating our bedroom – which includes making curtains for it. I bought the fabric a couple years ago, but because making curtains is so incredibly boring, I’ve been putting it off.

2. Finish clearing out the closet in our spare room – I want to move my sewing room to it, but the room is still a mess, and the closet still has too many things that I need to throw away or recycle.

In other words, I want to spend November cleaning up our house as much as I can! I hope everyone has a good month!

12 Responses to “Recap: October 2017”

At least it seems like you had a good end to your month overall. I love when fall cooperates around here(often we don’t get much of a fall or winter)
Your figurines made me smile. I LOVE them, and of course having them in a glass case will save on dusting. Plus it’ll draw attention to the beauties when you have company lol.

You’re very talented, obviously. I could never make a costume, or even draw for that matter. The only talent I really have is writing, and only when I feel motivated to do so bahaha.

Your photographs are fantastic, so I am sure that they will be using a lot of them. :D

Congratulations on the wedding and dating anniversary! It’s a shame that you couldn’t celebrate on that day, but I am sure that having another special day would be great. :)

Great news on the decluttering! It can make a huge difference. The glass shelving looks great! It can be a nightmare when you have to keep dusting all the time (I had to store some because of that haha).

That is so cool that your work has Halloween events and you are given a budget to create things. The decorations look brilliant (and spooky). I was watching your progress on the boots and it was so cool. :D

I enjoyed seeing all the drawings that you posted throughout inktober! :D You are talented! :D

Your collection is growing impressive every day it seems! OMG, Chell is amazing. I really really loved Portal 2 and Wheatley because he makes sense and then he doesn’t. Been following your work and you’ve improved so much so!

Happy anniversary! <3 6 years married is a long and short time together but I am glad that you and your husband are making it together.

Congratulations to you and your hubby for reaching your 6th year wedding anniversary! It’s never too late to celebrate the milestone ;). It’s so cool to know that you two have been dating for 12 years! Ok, how about when you met each other XD XD.

Glass shelf is where it’s at! Makes it easier to clean because dust won’t land all over your figures as easily! My boyfriend has the same thing for his Lego Star Wars XD.

Congrats on completing all 31 days of the Inktober challenge! Your artwork is so legit! Hey, I can totally imagine you making your own manga series.

It seems as if your October was a lot more interesting than mine…I often have the feeling that my life is building up to something that never seems to happen. *shrugs* Anyhow, the glass shelves give your figurines a very modern, chic vibe and makes their colors pop. I cannot wait to see the pictures of your decorated bedroom, and I would also like to congratulate you on your 6th year anniversary.

I loved how your work got volunteers instead of event staff to help with the conference. I volunteer a lot with different hackathons myself – with photography and videos too! So I understand how it feels when your work is presented out there. 🤗 Great job!

Happy 6th wedding anniversary! Despite it falling on the day of the conference, I’m glad that you got to celebrate anyway. 😙

I LOVEEEEEEED your portal costume, when I first saw it I was like “omg she did portal” OMG!!! Hahaha, it’s really well done Cat! You’re an incredible artist – love your inktober photos!

Happy 6th Wedding Anniversary! I’m glad you got to celebrate, even though it wasn’t on the actual day. We rarely celebrate our dating anniversary on the actual day because it’s so close to Christmas that there’s no point booking the day off. It’s nice when we can, but the specific date doesn’t really matter!

I love your glass shelves! I really need to put my figurines somewhere because dusting them is the worst. I usually try to avoid it for as long as possible!

I love your team’s area! It’s so cool that you got to do that. And your Portal costume is amazing!

Wow! 6 years! 12 years! Dangggg that’s time! Congratulations! And the conference seems like such fun too. I always enjoy meeting people from outer markets that I also support, because it’s like OH WE FINALLY MEET AS HUMAN BEINGZ!
also you guys’ office decorations we’re WILD!

That is awesome that they used some of your photos already. That is a nice feeling. I sort of relate because I always get a sense of pride when I walk into the ER of my job and see my design and code up on the huge TV for wait times. XD
6?! Already! That is amazing, congrats!
Cleaning… ug. I have been doing that like crazy with my extra room. I use to just put everything that wouldn’t go anywhere else in there but I wanted to change that and make it into more a guest room so I’m slowly getting rid of a lot of stuff.
Welp, now that my computer is fixed I shall be coming to comment more often – I hope. lol

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